Weather and Smart City Shun Chi-ming, Director of the Hong Kong Observatory

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1 Weather and Smart City Shun Chi-ming, Director of the Hong Kong Observatory

2 Be a model of excellence in protecting lives and building together a better society through SCIENCE

3 Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) is working on SMART use of BIG DATA that grow with time

4 Vast varieties of meteorological data Spiral rain bands Centre of Mangkhut

5 Global weather observations surface

6 Global weather observations air-borne

7 Global weather observations space-borne

8 Example of 6-hourly satellite data coverage LEO Sounders LEO Imagers Scatterometers GEO imagers Satellite Winds (AMVs) GPS Radio Occultation 7 January UTC

9 Meteorological satellite observations

10 HKO Big Data meteorological Global weather data via exchange 6 GB 219 GB Remote-sensing (satellites & external radars) 11.6 TB Local observations (since 1883) 300 GB 150 GB 23 GB Daily total ~ 12.3 TB

11 NWP model atmosphere as 3D grid Physical equations governing the evolution of atmosphere are applied, discretized and computed for each of the grid boxes

12 Global NWP model ECMWF Horizontal grid spacing ~ 9 km Over 9000 million grid points 137 levels ~ 162 PB of data output (~ 320 billion met fields in 16 million files) ~ 644 GB of metadata (per day)

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14 Super ECMWF HPCF Cray XC40 Anemos (CCA) Ventus (CCB) Phase 1 (3.6 petaflops peak & 200 teraflops sustained) operational since 17 September 2014 Phase 2 (8.5 petaflops peak & 333 teraflops sustained) operational since 6 June nodes / 129,960 compute cores per cluster Numbers 42 and 43 in the November 2018 Top 500 Supercomputers list

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16 HKO Big Data non-meteorological TV Weather Programmes 2.3 GB Traffic 0.4 GB 70 GB Daily total ~ 91 GB and growing 18 GB Incidents / News Flight data 0.4 GB

17 Big Data challenges

18 Sea change Enormous growth of meteorological big data Forecasters overwhelmed by the sea of weather data Future of the human forecaster? Emergence of crowdsourced weather data Weather observations shared by public Unstructured format with varying quality

19 Sea change Emergence of social media Spread of photos, videos, views & rumours (!) Prompt response a must to avoid potential crisis Weather information becoming a commodity Free / commercially available weather observations / forecasts from websites, smartphones, social media etc People not only asking for what the weather will be like but what it will do to them (impact)

20 Challenges are also opportunities Smart use of Big Data in HKO

21 Typhoon monitoring & analysis Super Typhoon Mangkhut Using realtime multi-source (weather station, radar and lightning data) observations on GIS platform

22 Weather impact analysis Storm surge rise in water level Typhoon winds, tree damage & flooding Hill fires - dry weather vs human activity (Chung Yeung Festival)

23 Intelligent Meteorological Monitoring Assistant (IMMA) In-house developed expert system supporting weather decision-making Automatic processing and translation of weather data into intelligence and actionable advice Traditional wisdom transformed into computer algorithms Award-winning : Gold Prize of Team Award (Internal Service) in the Civil Service Outstanding Gold Service Prize of Team Scheme 2017 Award (Internal ICT Awards 2018 Service) Smart Business the Civil Award (Solution for Business and Public Sector Enterprise) Service Outstanding - Certificate of Merit Service Scheme 2017 ICT Awards Smart Business Award (Solution for Business and Public Sector Enterprise) - Certificate of Merit

24 Sample advice from IMMA Heavy rain reported in Guangdong, rainfall nowcast system also suggested possible heavy rain shortly. Please consider the need for a RED Rainstorm Warning HK Relative humidity dropped to a rather low level, please consider the need for a RED Fire Danger Warning Historical record of maximum temperature at HKO just broken 24

25 Smart Visualization of Big Data from information to analytics EPS #2 EPS #1 Smartly combine all forecast typhoon tracks on a single strike probability map EPS #3 Typhoon track forecast based on multiple Ensemble Prediction Systems (EPS), each containing many possible tracking scenarios

26 Use of deep learning technique for smarter rainstorm prediction Rainstorms bring about significant impacts on socio-economic activities Nowcasting technique by tracking motion of rain echoes on radar is a key approach to the prediction of rainstorms

27 Deep learning resulting in better prediction Innovative Deep- Learning method to model the spatiotemporal correlation of radar sequences based on: Trajectory Gated Recurrent Unit (TrajGRU) Trajectory GRU Cell

28 Crowdsourced weather data Community Weather Information Network (Co-WIN) Since 2007 in collaboration with PolyU & CUHK Schools & community groups operate weather stations and share data 160+ member organizations

29 Crowdsourced weather data Effort further expanded to engage general public in 2011 via the Community Weather Observing Scheme (CWOS) Allow sharing of weather observations, photos, videos made conveniently using smartphones 80,000+ contributions collected by 7,000+ members

30 Crowdsourced weather data Cloud sourcing competition campaign during Dec 2017-Feb 2018 More than 2,000 high-quality photos and videos collected

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32 Time-lapse video competition Cloud sourcing competition campaign ongoing 1-min video of weather or atmospheric optical phenomena

33 Crowdsourcing of visual records of Mangkhut Broken windows Fallen trees HKO Jane Choy Overtopping waves Susanna Leung

34 Applications & benefits of community weather data Raising public awareness towards weather-related hazards & climate change Additional observations to supplement the weather network operated by HKO Contributing to HKO educational programmes, e.g. HKO calendar & Cool Met Stuff videos Leadership in updating International Cloud Atlas

35 International Cloud Atlas (

36 Climate change

37 World Economic Forum: Global risks landscape

38 World Economic Forum: Global risks landscape 2019

39 Super Typhoon Mangkhut September 2018 Most intense TC in 2018 hitting the south China coast Highest tropical cyclone warning signal, No. 10 in Hong Kong, lasting for 10 hours (2 nd on record) Bringing record high storm surge of over 2 m to Hong Kong, causing serious flooding in low-lying coastal areas Ferocious winds blowing down trees and shattering glass windows 39

40 Typhoon Jebi 4 September 2018, Strongest hitting Japan in 25 years 40

41 Casualties by tropical cyclones and storm surges (,000 people) Source: CRED EM-DAT 2016

42 Economic losses by tropical cyclones and storm surges (US$ billion) Source: CRED EM-DAT 2016

43 Weather-ready Impact-based multi-hazard early warnings 43

44 Climate-smart Reliable climate information to support climate change adaptation & resilience 44

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46 Weather sensing - microclimate station Bollard-type Solar panels on its top Temperature shield fabricated by 3D printing Sensors to measure temperature, humidity and pressure

47 Weather sensing - microclimate drone Microclimate sensors installed on drone

48 Microclimate stations

49 Urban/street-level fine-scale prediction

50 Smart lamppost pilot scheme 3 year project; ~400 lampposts in 4 districts Central / Admiralty Causeway Bay / Wan Chai Tsim Sha Tsui Kwun Tong / Kai Tak Development Area Collect weather, traffic and environment data. Weather data include: Temperature RH Wind speed and direction Rainfall UV index Ambient gamma radiation

51 Weather impact on road traffic Traffic congestion a commonplace in HK, and can become even worse in rainy days Study launched in collaboration with other government departments using big data analytics Traffic Information Rain gauge

52 Weather impact on road traffic Learn the correlation between rainfall amount and traffic speed Aim at predicting impact on road traffic due to rain Average speed Actual speed Actual speed Rainfall (mm) in 5 min Chatham Road North Predicted speed Predicted speed with rf nowcast Average speed Rainfall

53 Weather impact on air traffic Hazardous Weather also a crucial factor for air traffic safety and efficiency reduction of airport and air space capacity, affecting aviation safety Avoidance of hazardous weather for safety concern increase in flight delays, diversion and fuel consumption SMART airport study using multi-dimensional data: Weather radar on significant convection Lightning location Satellite images on cloud development Airport runway wind conditions Air Traffic Control Rules ADS-B data on Aircraft positions

54 Aircraft surveillance Weather Research project embarked to uncover the hidden relationship between weather, aircraft & air traffic data To enable automatic nowcast of weather impact on airport & nearby airspace for safer & more efficient air traffic management Heat map of flight arrival/departure routes

55 Further exploitation of user behavioural data MyObservatory 5th most popular mobile APP in HK 7.6+ million downloads & 146 billion page views in 2018 User activity information around 2.2 TB each month Using Big Data technique to analyse user behavioural data, giving insights on the development of more user-centric services

56 Health Weather Extreme weather & climate change pose genuine threat to public health Big data analytics on health data, e.g. heart rate and prevailing weather conditions may help generate personalized advice for users Partnership to be explored with relevant authorities/private sectors UV RADIATION EPIDEMIC HEAT STRESS DENGUE FEVER

57 Climate & influenza Favourable climatic zones for influenza A Red diamonds represent winter/spring peak periods Orange squares represent summer peak periods Blue circles represent trough periods Gray triangles indicate the average temp and RH of each calendar month

58 Heat stress

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61 Concluding remarks Smart use of Big Data key to HKO development Smart City x Weather offers huge potential in enhancing urban services Climate change poses unprecedented challenges Weather ready, climate smart

62 Thank you